If you have a taste for piquant comedy, you'll relish Nancy Nufer's "Food Confessions," which runs through Feb. 24 at the Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura.

Nufer, a veteran actor with a well-tuned funny bone, served up the starter and produced the funny, food-oriented script, but credits astute collaborators on both performance and production sides as the 75-minute humor feast developed through workshops and other cooperative efforts.

Director Jenny Sullivan is the "top chef" who stirs it all together at the Rubicon, with Nufer and a well-balanced cast riffing on food and what it's meant to each character along life's munchy way.

There's Hazel (Nufer) muttering about the palpably unsanitary concept of a salad bar, with all its possibilities for contamination. Others find horrors in random raisins popping up incessantly, eating eggplant (a big "vegetable parasite with no flavor of its own") or chewing anchovies ("like eating an eyebrow").

Some are obsessed with what they do like, as in the case of Colby (Kara Revel), who adores mac 'n' cheese, as long as it isn't contaminated by creeping additions such as, heaven forbid, peas or mushrooms. It's Revel again later explaining her attachment to the dish in a therapeutic confessional group.

The men, too, have odd relationships to food, passionate or diffident, all-in or all-out depending on personalities or situations. Dan Gunther, Devin Scott and Robert Lesser play multiple roles with canny character acumen. They move in and out of the roles of hipsters, baffled husbands, the suave, the savvy, the oafish and the nerdy — and they do it all with aplomb. All of the cast contributes to the show's musical moments, and they come through in fine voice and harmony.

Things get relatively serious in a section of the show called "Main Course — Life and Death," as food-related memories connect the past with the present. The final section, dubbed "Bittersweet Dessert — Family," finds everyone examining how food has played a role in shaping their lives, personalities and family relationships.

"Food Confessions" is a soufflé, but a delicious one with deft flavoring. Nufer's nonstop clever lines and observations keep it light without undercutting the verities within.

Thomas Giamario enters into the spirit with scenic design that revels in a contemporary cartoon take on the tables and chairs the diverse diners share, and Mary Froehlich buoys the spirit with costumes that are appropriate but amusingly a bit on the far side of reality.